Persephone Books discussion
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Feb/March poll
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I think we should readThe Marking of a Marchioness or Good Evening, Mrs. Craven.
Thanks very much Gina, I sure didn't miss the vote this time!
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Thanks!
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Excellent! I have my copies of 'Mrs Craven' and 'Marchioness' at the ready :)
Persephone Books
Books mentioned in this topic
Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes (other topics)To Bed With Grand Music (other topics)
Here's a description of all of the books, from the Persephone website:
Hi everyone-
It's time to vote again! Please choose one of the titles--the winner will be Feb , and the runner-up will be March.
Here's a description of each of the books:
A New System of Domestic Cookery (one of the newer Persephone releases):
A New System of Domestic Cookery by Mrs Rundell appeared first in 1806 and was frequently reprinted throughout the nineteenth century. The final edition was in 1893, when Mrs Beeton had been hugely popular for thirty years. It will be for food historians to work out why her book remained in print and Mrs Rundell’s vanished; but the fact is this is the first time Domestic Cookery has been reprinted for over a hundred years. We have used the 1816 edition, and are confident that most people will be able to cook from this book with ease, perhaps not as readily so as with Good Things in England but nevertheless nearly everyone will be able to adapt Mrs Rundell’s suggestions to present-day use with no difficulty.
We first came across her book in Jane Austen’s Cookbook by Maggie Black, since Domestic Cookery is one of the books Jane Austen would have used (had she cooked); our 1816 edition appeared in the same year as Emma. The Cookbook has ten of Mrs Rundell’s recipes: for beef- steak pudding, apple pie, solid syllabubs, apple puffs, salmagundy, oyster loaves, little iced cakes, pigeon pie, orange peel straws in syrup, and rout drop cakes.
To Bed with Grand Music (also a newer one):
To Bed with Grand Music is about sex in wartime. On the first page (a scene as compelling in its way as the five conception scenes at the beginning of Manja) Deborah and her husband are saying goodbye to each other before he is posted overseas. They swear undying loyalty, well, undying emotional loyalty because the husband does not deny that he might not be able to be faithful all the time he is away. But once he is gone, Deborah is soon bored by life in a village with her small son and decides to get a job in London. Here she acquires a lover, and another, and another. As Juliet Gardiner, the historian, says in her Preface, this is a near harlot’s tale. But she admires the book very much because it shows such a different side of the war from that shown in, for example, Jocelyn Playfair’s A House in the Country, which is full of people mostly behaving honourably. The title of To Bed with Grand Music comes from an essay by Sir Thomas Browne called ‘On Dreams’ where he writes, ‘Happy are they that go to bed with grand music, like Pythagoras, or have ways to compose the fantastical spirit, whose unruly wanderings take off inward sleepe.’ And indeed Deborah is both happy at going to bed with grand music, and unruly. Although this is, in some ways, a rather shocking book, it is also very funny. There is a scene when she is making a token gesture about resisting her first lover and he says that if his wife was in the same position as Deborah, ie with her husband away possibly for a long time, he would want her to have a lover so that she would not be bad-tempered. This is rather typical of the ironic, sardonic, yet possibly realistic tone of the book, which certainly throws light on the wartime years in a quite different way from any other novel that we know of.
Good Evening, Mrs Craven: (Persephone classic)
For fifty years Mollie Panter-Downes's name was associated with The New Yorker, for which she wrote a regular 'Letter from London', book reviews and over thirty short stories; of the twenty one in Good Evening, Mrs Craven, written between 1939 and 1944, only two had ever been reprinted - these very English stories have, until now, been unavailable to English readers.
Exploring most aspects of English domestic life during the war, they are about separation, sewing parties, fear, evacuees sent to the country, obsession with food, the social revolutions of wartime. In the Daily Mail Angela Huth called Good Evening, Mrs Craven 'my especial find' and Ruth Gorb in the Ham & High contrasted the humour of some of the stories with the desolation of others: 'The mistress, unlike the wife, has to worry and mourn in secret for her man; a middle-aged spinster finds herself alone again when the camaraderie of the air-raids is over...
The Making of a Marchioness: (Persephone classic)
Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) and The Secret Garden (1911) are enduring bestsellers, but this 1901 novel is many people's favourite: Nancy Mitford and Marghanita Laski loved it, and some US college courses teach it alongside Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre.
Part I, the original Marchioness, is in the Cinderella (and Miss Pettigrew) tradition, while Part II, called The Methods of Lady Walderhurst, is an absorbing melodrama; most novels end 'and they lived happily ever after' but this one develops into a realistic commentary on late-Victorian marriage. 'Delightful... A sparky sense of humour combined with lively social commentary make this a joy to read' wrote the Bookseller. Kate Saunders told Open Book listeners that she was up until two in the morning finishing this 'wildly romantic tale whose hero and heroine are totally unromantic' (Daily Telegraph); the Guardian referred to 'a touch of Edith Wharton's stern unsentimentality'; the Spectator wrote about the novel's 'singular charm'; and the Daily Mail stressed the 'sharp observations in this charming tale.'